Donor lung allocation scheme: how can we measure success?

Abstract

The National Health Service Blood and Transplant Cardiothoracic Advisory Group, in line with the principles of priority to the sickest and equal access to opportunities to benefit from transplantation, revised the UK Lung Allocation Scheme (UKLAS) from a geography-based to a clinical urgency-based scheme. The primary aim was to prioritise the sickest registered lung transplant candidates, providing access to the national donor lung pool, irrespective of geographical zones. Two criteria-based urgent tiers were adopted in the 2017 UKLAS: (1) the super-urgent lung allocation scheme (SULAS) for patients on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation support and (2) the urgent lung allocation scheme (ULAS) for patients with deterioration in disease-specific physiological parameters.